Virtual Reality is about to come and hit the living rooms of media consumers. Many applications, even beyond gaming have made it to the market already. The oculus store is at its leap from beta stadium to the final consumer version. And so are the most renowned HMDs (head mounted displays) like the Vive, the Rift or the GearVR. This means the first wave of consumer ready Virtual Reality is able to change the way we perceive media content. Only a few people have been able to experience VR already. Especially those, who don´t have a deeper insight to the media content creation industry, were mind-blown about what they saw, no wait, experienced. A lot of investment is going on. Not only the huge acquisition of oculus by Facebook but also the minor investments in companies which do a great job in R&D for new user interfaces or VR content creation, will force Virtual Reality to get to a massive breakthrough. VR works. And it works for marketing too. Statista prognoses the industry to become a multi-billion dollar industry within the next few years.

Virtual Reality creates new worlds. Within these worlds, there are new innovative possibilities for companies to communicate their brands and concepts to their customers. It is a very direct and intimate communication, which fully leverages the human audio-visual perception. Even companies like Lufthansa smelled the potential and used this new instrument on trade shows to draw people into their booths. Advertising becomes experience. Within the next few months, the technology will be in people’s homes. There are already efforts to make VR social. Facebook and AltspaceVR place yourself as avatars into creative worlds. Those places provide social media content like watching Twitch or Netflix. You can talk to your friends from around the globe in a tiny virtual room, watch movies with them and even play Dungeons & Dragons. The feeling of presence and immersion is overwhelming. This is the next big thing after Facebook. It is going to create a demand and people will want to be a part of the VR hype.

A huge advantage of VR is that it places users right in front of your products. They can even walk around, touch, move and play with them. They perceive space, size, colour and light within a controllable environment. Presentations use high-level real-time render solutions to make your products shine. The potential of game engines makes interaction with objects and other users possible. This leads to a major enhancement of immersion. If you take the possibilities into account what internet browsers deliver these days, combine it with the ever-increasing bandwidth, the advancing quality of computer generated imagery and cloud services, we´re even able to imagine virtual shopping malls. Those will be selling real-estate, theme-park rides, movie theatres or otherworldly game experiences, designed to match each customers individual preferences.

And what do we do? AURA designs and creates those experiences. The team consists of developers and artists, who utilize state-of-the-art content creation tools. It has recourse to the know-how of filmmaking and advertising of Region Five´s talented production team, a network of visionaries, visualizers and storytellers. AURA takes your ideas to the virtual world.